Yes, Google started in Susan Wojcicki’s rented garage. But in her mind, that might be the single least important fact about her long relationship with the Internet giant.

Thirteen years ago, the then-tiny company’s former landlord became its 16th employee and first marketing manager. Today, she is one of its 12 senior vice presidents, although by one measure she is first among equals: The advertising products she oversees accounted for about 96 percent of Google’s revenues in 2010.

In her years at Google, the 42-year-old Wojcicki (pronounced Whoa-jit-ski) has been a driving force in many of the company’s signature initiatives: AdSense, which places Google advertising on other websites and blogs, and its acquisitions of DoubleClick and YouTube. Even the doodles that distinguish Google’s home page were developed by her.

Wojcicki, in short, might be the most important Googler you’ve never heard of.

“I don’t think she’s concerned about that. Susan’s interested in doing a great job and making sure her team gets recognition for the things they do,” Costolo said.

Inside the company, the low-key, even-keeled executive is known as a talented manager who inspires people. As Google’s chief moneymaker — advertising products under Wojcicki brought in $28.2 billion in revenue in 2010 — she also has a striking belief in the odd mix of professorial idealism and capitalistic ambition that comprises Google’s sense of self.

“The reason I like my job is that I have this desire to create,” Wojcicki said in a rare interview. “I have this desire to create things and build things, and Google has enabled me to build and create things and to build products that are used by people all over the globe.”

She has helped shape the company’s unconventional culture, drawing on her experience as the first Googler to have a baby and as a pioneer who has navigated the cultural land mines that make women so rare among Silicon Valley executives.

Baby steps have grown into clout

“I have tried to be a leader,” she said. “I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons.”

Wojcicki’s clout at Google reflects her unique relationship with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Like them, she is from a family of academics.

The three met when Brin and Page paid Wojcicki $1,700 a month to rent the garage of her house in Menlo Park, Calif., the first home for a newly incorporated Google, in 1998. Along with the parade of venture capitalists, journalists and other visitors who found their way to the offices of the embryonic search engine through Wojcicki’s living room was the woman who became Brin’s wife — Susan’s youngest sister, Anne.

A Silicon Valley native who grew up on the Stanford campus as the oldest daughter of the chair of the physics department, Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard before eventually joining Google as its first marketing manager.

“We had no marketing budget, but I was supposed to market the company — by myself,” she recalled. “It was a little overwhelming.”

Yet she quickly made the crucial early decision to embed Google’s search box for free in university websites and elsewhere across the Internet to build traffic.

But Wojcicki’s biggest impact at Google has been developing AdSense, which transformed the Web by allowing hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs to make money by displaying Google ads. AdSense spread more than $6 billion in ad revenue across the Internet in 2010 and now has more than a million websites and blogs running Google’s ads. It is the company’s second-largest source of revenue, after search advertising on its own sites.

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em

Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, had the idea to run ads within Google’s e-mail service. But he and others say it was Wojcicki who organized the team that adapted that idea into an enormously successful product.

Despite her success with AdSense, Wojcicki by 2006 was running a Google unit — Google Video — that was getting trounced by a small startup called YouTube, where millions of people shared their self-produced videos online.

Wojcicki’s solution to that problem shows her calm under fire. With just a day’s notice, she developed and presented to Google’s board the financial model justifying the $1.65 billion purchase.

“I knew it was going to be really hard for us to catch up and that this was a real phenomenon,” Wojcicki said. “I understood it, because we had our own product.”

Wojcicki’s fingerprints also are on some of Google’s most controversial products, including some advertising programs that have been blasted by privacy advocates because they collect voluminous data on users.

“Google has not been honest about its data-collection practices. It tries to veil what it does,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Some privacy advocates have derided Google for trying to soft-pedal their concerns. One example they could cite is a blog post Wojcicki wrote in 2009, announcing that Google would start tracking users’ movements across the Internet in order to target advertising. But the post, headlined “Making ads more interesting,” never used the word “tracking.” She described it, benignly, as “interest-based advertising.”

While helping build the Google juggernaut, Wojcicki gave birth to four children. Until recently, she drove a minivan, and now drives a Toyota Highlander hybrid suitable for soccer-mom duties. She said a key to her work-family philosophy is to “compartmentalize,” broadcasting clear boundaries between work and home.

“My kids know I’m home every night for dinner,” she said.

Expected to take more visible role

With Page moving up to become CEO, executives such as Wojcicki and another early Googler, YouTube chief Salar Kamangar, are expected to step up and take more visible roles. That is something Wojcicki may find uncomfortable. Former Googlers say she has a knack for recruiting and motivating other strong leaders but shuns the spotlight for herself.

Pete Koomen, who joined Google in 2006 fresh from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and not long afterward was chosen by Wojcicki to work directly with the founders and senior executives in setting Google’s goals before each quarter, said he was struck by the regard Page and Brin, both of whom are strong personalities, had for Wojcicki.

“They are just incredibly imaginative, and meetings can have a tendency to go off track a little bit,” said Koomen, who left Google last year. “Susan has always had this amazing ability to focus them and challenge them.”

Susan Wojcicki file

Age: 42

Joined Google: 1999, as employee No. 16

Position: Senior vice president responsible for all of Google’s advertising and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Analytics

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